Modern Warfare II Gets Battlefield Vibe With Massive Invasion And Ground War Battles

Sometimes when you’re part of a really huge online battle, you can find that rare moment and spot on the map where everyone in the game makes the mistake of ignoring you. You get the chance to shoot fish into a barrel and wonder if everyone else is a bot.

That’s the feeling I had this weekend when I got the chance to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II multiplayer beta on PC as I had my best round ever. Last week I played enough to get to the first 15 levels of the PlayStation 5 beta. And this week I earned another 15 levels, maxing out at level 30 on the PC/Xbox beta. My accounts are linked so I was able to continue leveling from PS5 to PC.

During all those hours of playing, I had one round where I went into a state of power and slaughtered the enemy. It was in the Sa’id map in Ground War mode where 32 human players compete against 32 human players in huge maps. I managed to get 42 kills and only suffer seven deaths. I had some good Killstreaks and some triple kills. This never happens, in case you’re wondering if I’m really good. But this is what Call of Duty players live for, a chance to be the hero and whoop the other side. The good thing about this particular map is that it is set up in such a way that this is possible.

I played the game on a Falcon Northwest computer with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card and a 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 processor. It’s not the most powerful machine anymore, but the graphics of the game looked pretty great to me.

Modern Warfare ll features a physical-based material system that enables realistic photogrammetry, a new hybrid tile-based streaming system, a new PBR water and underwater rendering system, world volumetric lighting, 4K HDR and more, as well as a new GPU geometry pipeline.

While I played a lot of 6v6 basic multiplayer maps last week, this time I tried the really big modes. Ground War was my favorite, as two teams had to struggle to control five points on the big map. Invasion was also pretty interesting, as it has 20 people against 20 people, with 20 AI bots on each side.

Usually I have pretty pathetic results, getting killed twice for every kill, or even trading one for one. That’s enough to put me in maybe the top five million Call of Duty players.

But I enjoyed being a demon in one round with my Signal 50 sniper rifle and a 556 Icarus light machine gun. I was able to carry two primary weapons thanks to the Assault Perk Package. And I rounded out my sniper set with an ammo box field upgrade, a proximity mine that fires when it detects movement, and a flash grenade. I felt that my weapons were quite powerful and that the LMG was stable without a sight and a large magazine of 100 bullets to keep it under control. With this kit I managed to get through camping and sniping. The other team had enough chances to take me out. But they failed to do this.

The Sa’id map was actually much better than the Sarrif Bay map that ran through Ground War mode this weekend in my opinion. The Sa’id map led players through several lanes of multi-storey buildings in a desert city. There is a flat amusement park on one side and a road on the other. So the players just storm each other in huge waves, using foot soldiers, tanks, APCs and helicopters. It’s a three-dimensional battle and the easiest way to play is to jump into a tank or sneak from above.

I chose to snipe from the tallest buildings in front of a plaza that resembled a kill zone that players had to traverse as they made their way to two of the five targets. And it turned out that it was quite difficult to chase me off the top buildings, although experienced players could have done it quite easily by dropping hard-earned cruise missiles on me. Fortunately, that didn’t really happen.

In many of the other rounds I played, I died in every way imaginable, with VTOL planes or attack helicopters raining bullets from above. I saw other snipers, cruise missiles, tanks, APCs and stealth bastards sneaking up behind you and killing you. You have many ways to die in WWII. I found them all. But it’s a thrill to turn the tables and take back your enemies for once. Call me a camper, but I found I did better mixing it up, running around with the LMG and sniping at different times.

For the most part, the game was stable. I only saw a delay in one of the rounds I played, and it was so bad I had to pull out. But lag didn’t stop me from jumping into the breach again.

Conclusion

This is one of the best betas I’ve seen for a recent Call of Duty, probably since 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. And it’s not because I happened to have one good round. Ground War and Invasion modes will be a welcome addition, and it should ward off the urge to play the rival Battlefield with its massive battles. It shows how important it is to get the cards right.

The Battlefield multiplayer rounds I played were plagued with bugs. And they were too scattered, where it took way too long to run from one target to another. That was the case for me with Sarrif Bay (although there were some nice water fights). With Call of Duty you don’t have dogfights with player-controlled jets, but that means the maps are smaller and more intense. That intensity is something this Call of Duty does well. I’m looking forward to the game’s debut on October 28th.